Sport mirrors so many aspects of life. To watch the scenes at the end of a very close game: to watch the winning teams’ supporters and the losing teams’ supporters. To watch the little kid, with his or her face painted, the huge cap covering their faces, tears streaming down, to watch the wise old person who has watched a lot of games put their arm gently around the little kid. A fan is a fan, 12 years old or 55, wise or otherwise and your team is your team. South Africa may have lost a close T-20 game to Australia but Kagiso Rabada is one of my favorite modern day cricketers.

Back home, the Irani Trophy game is unfolding. Jay Bista and Karun Nair batting so well. Bista seems like a throw back to a different era. Bespectacled, quiet and studious, quite a contrast to the present day cricketer of bulging muscles, flaunting tattoos and extremely well groomed beards etc; How nice it would have been if Murali Vijay and Cheteshwar Pujara and five strong wicket taking bowlers had played for Rest Of India. Would have been a really nice way to test the true strength of this present Mumbai team and to find out which players will make it to the next level.

Edit: (added after the completion of the Irani trophy game) What a beautiful game it turned out to be. After conceding a lead of more than 250 runs, Rest of India came back to win this game. It was truly beautiful. The fourth day provided a startling twist and the fifth day saw both teams in the hunt. Beautiful batting by Faiz Fazal, Karun Nair, Sudip Chaterjee and a lovely cameo by Stuart Binny took Rest of India home. Another beautiful part of sport, (life?) although this sounds cliched but is somehow true, is to perhaps keep hope right until the end.

The Guardian is a lovely newspaper indeed. Amongst other things, cricket match reports, rendered redundant in these days of instant multimedia communication, is still beautifully done, retaining the freshness and spontaneity, that seem to be missing in these days of cliched filled reporting.

Anyway, there is a lovely article about why the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein loved cricket so much.

For me, though, the more likely draw for Wittgenstein was the game’s language. His whole life was spent attempting to deconstruct the lines of code underpinning evolution’s most fabulous app – verbal communication. And cricket, with its dense and extraordinary quilt of gorgeous words and phrases, must have utterly captivated him.

The complexity of cricket necessitates an equally complex language merely to describe the basics of the game. There’s quite a lot of vocab for a player to learn just to know where to stand on the field. Imagine a circle of radius three metres around a batsman. Any fielder brave enough to stand on that circle can be described as any of (the titular) silly point, silly mid-off, silly mid-on, short leg, backward short leg, leg slip, slip or gully, depending on which point of the compass they are standing on in relation to the batsman.

There is always a sense of melancholiness associated with moving apartments / houses. All of one’s life’s thoughts, dreams, hopes, aspirations, happiness and sadness are suddenly neatly packaged into boxes. One also opens older boxes , which one packed a long time ago, thereby recovering memories from an age gone by. A old birthday card your sister sent becomes especially poignant, when the current state of that relationship has hit a bit of a trough, the random donations one made to hospitals (was I capable of those acts of kindness at one point? whatever happened to all that kindness now? Why cannot one be kinder to one’s parents atleast, who have done so much for their children?), the photocopied books in myriad subjects like math, music, Indian philosophy and cricket (looking at these from 10 years ago, I am staggered that I had actually wanted to read these dense, abstruse tomes at one point in my life), the romantic idealism of one’s early twenties gives way to a more painful sense of reality at 30. This was supposed to be the decade that separated boyhood from manhood in some sense. I am struggling to demarcate that mentally. A feeling remains of not having “grown up”, (in the truest, deepest sense of that word). Although, I loved books and reading and learning, I never thought I would spend my entire twenties in graduate school. Relationships, unlike the beautiful subjects like math and music are messy and complicated. One has no idea of what is reasonable and what is not. Naively, one wishes to marry happiness rather than a person. (Ramana Maharishi’s prescient observation that all beings desire happiness at all points of time is the natural, immutable law valid for all time, comes to mind). Falling in love though is easy, abstracted love is easier than the concrete actual, messy thing. Do these crushes / infatuations etc that strike you unannounced leaving you with powerful feelings and exhaustion actually have an inner, deeper meaning or are they completely random and capricious? Is love at first sight, the kind that they show in movies and the kind that one reads about in Shakespearean plays actually true in real life? (It does seem true when it hits you, but for a guy like me, the lines between reality and fantasy were always a bit blurred). Nostalgia has grown. So has sentimentality. Watching older cricket videos from one’s childhood moves me to tears (which cricket lover wouldn’t be moved by the silken, graceful, languid and delicate touch of Mohammad Azharuddin, what does one do when one loves cricket to such an extent that simply watching a two minute video of a tour game: Australians vs West Indies Board President’s Eleven and watching Fawad Ahmed bowl beautiful, classical leg spin and watching those young West Indian batsman take on the Australian bowlers fearlessly fills one with so much joy). The feeling remains though of what could have been, had one concentrated on the math and not just floated like a leaf in the whirlpool of life, allowing it to take you in the direction of its choosing. Having not built up the stamina to keep at mathematics amidst all distractions during one’s formative years, one really struggles to dig deeper for extra ounces of strength when one’s research hits some rough spots.

The themes and concerns of humanity seem to remain the same: it’s hopes and aspirations, dreams, things that move and disgust it, across cultures, across time. The previous fluff line is to merely remark that the movie, Children of Heaven is truly beautiful. Go and watch it if you already haven’t done so.

‘Tis a brave master,
Let it have scope,
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope;
High and more high,
It dives into noon,
With wing unspent,
Untold intent;
But ’tis a god,
Knows its own path,
And the outlets of the sky.
‘Tis not for the mean,
It requireth courage stout,
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending;
Such ’twill reward,
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.

Leave all for love;—
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more thy heart behoved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor,
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, for ever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.
Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
Vague shadow of surmise,
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free,
Do not thou detain a hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Tho’ her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.

Vladimir Arnold once famously said that every mathematics advisor gives his or her student a gift, which the student appreciates at the right time. Maybe life itself is like this. Every moment, happy or difficult, comes encoded with a gift, which is somehow our duty to decode.